College Sex - Philosophy for Everyone: Philosophers With Benefits (30 page)

John Gechter’s part-time porn-acting career was cut short when emails circulated around Grove City College with photographic evidence of his extracurricular career and was indefinitely suspended for acting contrary to the stated values of the Christian college. Like Reid, though perhaps to a lesser degree, Gechter contravened his values – religious in nature

– in order to finance his way to a higher education. Before he left the university, he was the target of both ridicule and hate mail.

Prostitution Meets Internet: A Global Crisis

The media spotlight shines brightly on controversial stories like those of Natalie Dylan, Rosie Reid, and John Gechter, yet its glare distracts us from the shadows where most college prostitution is occurring: via free classifieds websites such as craigslist, backpage, and redbook, as well as via webcam and other discretion-enabling technologies. Such college student prostitution spans the US, France, and Britain, among other nations.

Laura D. was a 19-year-old college student in France when she eased into prostitution via the Internet. While browsing the Internet, she encountered a personal ad that stated: “Young man aged 50 looking for occasional massage. Students welcome.” The man paid her 250 euros (about US$359). Laura recounts her tales of a college student prosti- tute in her memoir
Mes chères études
.
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Laura claims that her college student status was a “selling point” to potential clients, as it fed into a “Lolita” type of fantasy these older men seemed to have. Laura reports that some of these men were violent with her, but that they rationalized their abuse by the fact they were helping a poor college student pay for her education.

Laura’s memoir is intended not only as an informative recounting of her experiences but also as a warning to other college students who may be tempted down the same path of Internet-facilitated prostitution. Laura states that while Internet negotiations with clients afforded a feel- ing of safety, it also may have made her especially vulnerable to abuse: “I felt safe behind the screen … but it was a lure, because at the meeting [with the client], I was alone and no one could help me.”
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Meanwhile, Laura D. has given up prostitution, stating: “I’m still a student and I have a hard time living,” but noting that prostitution was not the answer: “It’s really hard to find yourself in front of a 50-year-old man, naked, and to become an object of fantasy.”
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To shine a spotlight on the Internet-fueled explosion of college- student prostitution, Eva Clouet, a 23-year-old master’s student in soci- ology at a university in France, wrote a book on the subject.
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Instead of needing to peddle sex on the streets, college students can discreetly serve as an “erotic escort” or “erotic masseuse.” Estimates by a student union reports that as many as 40,000 French students resort to prostitution to meet college costs.
29
Research from Kingston University in 2006 esti- mates that the number of students there who resort to prostitution

increased by 50 percent between 1999 and 2005, due to a sharp rise in tuition across universities.
30

The case of Laura D. provides us with reason to suspect that statistics underestimate prostitution’s prevalence among college students: “There are a huge number of girls like me who do not talk about it, even with their friends. It’s hard to talk about, so it stays secret and taboo.”
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As tuition rates rise worldwide, we can extrapolate that this crisis of college- student prostitution will proportionately increase, as well as other forms of sexual exploitation.

The Dorm Porn Industry

“Peep shows” are an American standard in the pornography industry. With the rise of webcams in the Internet age, a troubling number of young women and men are engaging in webcam “peep shows” in order to afford college expenses. VoyeurDorm, CocoDorm, and DancerDorm are three such websites based on a simple premise: wire a private dormi- tory with webcams and charge viewers to watch. The first two boast of their college student residents, the last of its “hot” dancers, struggling to make a living.

VoyeurDorm’s website advertises “the girls of Voyeur Dorm are fresh, naturally erotic and as young as 18. Catch them in the most intimate acts of youthful indiscretion.”
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Subscribers can watch the college students as they walk around naked, shower, party, dance, masturbate, have sex, and urinate. CocoDorm is the gay male version of VoyeurDorm, and DudeDorm is a mix of heterosexual and gay college students from the University of Southern Florida. Both sites promise similar sexually voyeuristic viewing as VoyeurDorm. And all three sites pay the students’ college expenses, and even a bit more: the six male USF students receive free tuition, free rent, and a salary of between $500 and $600 a week.
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VoyeurDorm’s web-broadcast “sex shows” can be one-on-one, or to audiences of multiple viewers. Over 80,000 web peeping-toms subscribe to VoyeurDorm at $34.95 monthly. Nearly 40 percent of these toms pony up an additional $16 a month for the ability to chat one-on-one with the female residents. VoyeurDorm takes in $40 million annually.
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In-the-flesh prostitution seems more violating of college students’ integ- rity than sex exploitation via webcam. Nonetheless, webcam exploitation can be thought of as a soft form of prostitution: college students are allowing

images of their bodies to be used for gratification, and will often actively engage in sexual acts for their audience, all to raise money for college.

Large dorm-porn operations, such as these, number a handful. More prevalent are webcam sites which employ “camgirls” – women who put on sex shows for subscribers. Also common are the independent web- cams run by a college student herself, where she will perform sex shows to viewers for a fee. And if viewers have a webcam as well, they can often pay extra to “interact” with the camgirl, masturbating while she performs sexual acts by herself or with others.

With the safe, reliable, and anonymous middleman of PayPal, “cam- girls” and “camboys” can collect their fees from cyber-peepers safely and without much chance of legal action: zoning laws may differ from county, state, and country. Furthermore, all a college woman needs to broadcast her own sex show for money is a webcam, a PayPal account, and the willingness to engage in sexual acts for strangers. Of course, such “will- ingness” is usually one of desperation when it concerns college women trying to find a way to afford college. Despite what the ads promote, the college women who work as camgirls are not as “eager to please” as web- site banners suggest to potential subscribers. Of course, some of the sex- cam businesses trade on the allure of sexual exploitation, enticing cyber-peeping-toms with ads such as “18yo college student fucking to pay her tuition.” The very real desperation of some of these women feeds into the rape fantasies that many of the cyber-toms have.

DormPorn and other peep shows not only sexually exploit college stu- dents, but they provide an all-too-perfect gateway to in-the-flesh prostitu- tion. Interactive webcam shows with cyber-toms can lead to the tom propositioning the camgirl to go one step further: meet them for real-life sex. Oftentimes, the tom will be willing to pay for the travel expenses, if necessary, in addition to a large pay-out for services rendered. Such propo- sitions go so far as to include requests that the camgirl or boy become a temporary sex slave. On a counseling website, one college student asks Dr. Joseph M. Carver, an online clinical psychologist, whether or not she should agree to become a sex slave to a couple for whom she had been performing webcam sex shows: “They wanted to pay me a lot of money – more than my psychology degree will cost me – if I would not only have sex with them.… They wanted to tie me up, and more [graphic details omitted].”
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She inti- mates that she is torn between her desperation to pay her college expenses and her fear of suffering physical and emotional damage.

While such sexual slavery cases may prove rare, the downward path of exploitation from webcam sex show to real-life prostitution is an easy one

to descend, and financial desperation pressures many college students to walk it. The descent is especially tempting for many camgirls who feel they have some familiarity with the cyber-toms that are “regulars” to their sites, which can provide camgirls with a modicum of comfort and safety, though often illusory.

Future Consequences of Exploitation

Younger college students may not be able to fully appreciate the future consequences of allowing themselves to be exploited. Egg donation, as previously mentioned, is one example of a choice that may haunt some female donors later in life. Though the women being targeted by egg donation companies are legal adults, they might not be mature enough to fully appreciate the gravity of their decision. How can any of us know how we will feel decades into the future? Our identities change drasti- cally: our values, our roles, our life aspirations.

Sex exploitation carries similar consequences, both internally and externally to the person. Internally, an individual may suffer emotional distress from their subjugation. Externally, evidence of their sexual exploi- tation may follow them, as in the case of Rosie Reid, Natalie and Avia Dylan, and John Gechter, among too many others. Laura D., for instance, now working in a Paris restaurant, expresses regret over her life as a col- lege student prostitute: “It is difficult now with boys. I hope never to go back to it. It is very violent. It’s a money relationship and there is financial domination. It is very difficult to rebuild oneself afterwards.”
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These young adults will never be free of their past, where the quip “I was young: I needed the money!” doesn’t seem so funny. Beyond the emotional trauma of prostitution lies the specter of their self-exploitative decisions rematerializing. An 18-year-old female college student, for instance, may come to regret having served as a webcam girl, if video of her masturbating comes back one day to haunt her as a mother, as a wife, as a more discreet person who might be mortified by such footage. Even the webcam captives of VoyeurDorm, as well as other camgirls, may be forever haunted by the fact that their sexual exploita- tion is saved on hard disk somewhere and may later rear its ugly and shameful head.

A college education aims to empower young persons to flourish personally and financially. Unfortunately, the skyrocketing cost of tuition carries a

hidden human cost: the sexual exploitation of college students who cannot otherwise afford it. No longer is college education necessarily affordable through the traditional means of part-time work and financial aid. And no longer is college unnecessary to achieving a comfortable standard of living. College is essential to young adults flourishing, achieving, and empow- ering themselves: it must also be essential that a higher education is afford- able. Otherwise, exorbitant expenses of a higher education will exact a high price on our youth. It will undermine our young students’ identity, autonomy, and wellbeing.They will have sold their soul for a degree, strug-

gling to reach the American Dream – now beyond their reach.

NOTES

1. Catey Hill, “Student Natalie Dylan from San Diego Auctions Her Virginity, Reportedly Got Bids up to $3.7 Million,”
   NY Daily News
   , January 13, 2009. To protect their privacy, both sisters have elected to use pseudonyms, which I will use throughout.
   

2. Carey Polis, “Now Up for Auction: One Virginity,”
   Huffington Post
   , January 26, 2009.
   

3. Belinda Goldsmith, “Student Auctions Virginity, Sparks Online Debate,”
   

   Reuters
   , September 11, 2008.
   

4. David Cohen, “‘PayYour Tuition with Eggs’ Students Urged,”
   Guardian
   , May 29, 2001, available online at www.guardian.co.uk/education/2001/ma
   y/29/ internationaleducationnews.highereducation (accessed August 6, 2009).
   

5. Immanuel Kant,
   Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals
   , trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper and Row, 1964).
   

6. Natalie Dylan, “Why I’m Selling My Virginity,”
   Daily Beast
   , January 23, 2009.
   

7. Ibid.
   

8. “False Concsiousness,” Dictionary.com, available online at www.dictionary. reference.com/browse/false%20consciousness (accessed August 6, 2009).
   

9. Kimberly Launier and Katie Escherich, “Ashley Dupré Exclusive: My Side of the Story,”
   20/20: ABC News
   , November 19, 2008, available online at
   www. abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=6280407&page=1 (accessed August 6, 2009).
   

10. Ibid.
    

11. Catharine MacKinnon, in her book
    Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws
    (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), claims that “force” relating to sex should include hierarchies of power, where, presumably, a woman is
    de facto
    punished by not allowing herself to be employed as a sex object by her hier- archical superior/s.
    

12. Katharine Hansen, “What is a College Education Good for Anyway?”
    Career Source Magazine
    , March 13, 2007.
    

13. Ibid.
    

14. Tamar Lewin, “College May Become Unaffordable for Most in US,”
    New York Times
    , December 3, 2008.
    

15. Ibid.
    

16. Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
    The Social Contract
    , ed. Lee A. Jacobus (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins Press, 2006), section 1.2.3.
    

17. Ibid., section 1.4.3.
    

18. Ibid., section 1.4.6.
    

19. John Stuart Mill,
    On Liberty
    (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 158.
    

20. No Author, “Student ‘Sells Virginity’ via Web,”
    BBC News
    , March 21, 2004, available online at www.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/bristol/some
    r set/3554121.stm (accessed August 6, 2009).
    

21. Ibid.
    

22. Ibid.
    

23. Ibid.
    

24. Ibid.
    

25. Laura D.,
    Mes chères études
    [My Dear Studies] (Paris: Max Milo, 2008).
    

26. Lisa [No Last Name Given], “Seeking Lolita: Student Prostitution in France,”
    French News for Anglophones Blog
    , January 30, 2008, available online at www.frenchnewsforanglophones
    .blogspot.com/2008/01/seeking- lolita-student-prostitution-in.html (accessed August 6, 2009).
    

27. Ibid.
    

28. Eva Clouet,
    La Prostitution étudiante à l’heure des nouvelles technologies de com- munication
    [Student Prostitution in a Time of New Communication Technologies] (Paris: Max Milo, 2008).
    

29. See the SUD Education web page at www
    .sudeducation.org/ (accessed August 6, 2009).
    

30. Jonathan Milne, “Female Students Turn to Prostitution to Pay Fees,”
    Times Online
    , October 6, 2008, available online at
    www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ news/uk/article665019.ece (accessed August 6, 2009).
    

31. Charles Bremner, “Confessions of a Student Who Sold Sex to Live and Learn,”
    Times Online
    , January 18, 2009.
    

32. VoyeurDorm website, www.voy
    eurdorm.com (accessed August 6, 2009).
    

33. Steve Huettel, “Where the Dudes Are: Pinellas Park,”
    St. Petersburg Times
    , February 3, 2000.
    

34. Perdue Lewis,
    EroticaBiz: How Sex Shaped the Internet
    (Sonoma: Harper Collins, 2002).
    

35. Joseph M. Carver, “College Student Asks: Should I Take a Job as a Sex Slave?”
    Counseling Resource
    , December 4, 2008, available at
    www. counsellingresource.com/ask-the-psychologist/2008/12/04/job-as-sex-slave/ (accessed August 6, 2009). Graphic details omitted in the original text.
    

36. Bremner, “Confessions of a Student Who Sold Sex to Live and Learn.”